Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker
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Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker
#2Wow, they've built a distributed Amazon listing scraping system – essentially a botnet.
As someone who has done a lot of web scraping and had to route around a lot of blocking (we have business contracts to allow scraping, but they don't stop over-eager sysadmins), this feels like a dream come true.
But I'd never actually want to use this for scraping and I'm not sure any informed user would agree to use this.
Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker
#3[deleted]
Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker
#4And not sure if Amazon would agree to this as it essentially threatens the privacy and integrity of their users. Interestingly, Keepa is also an Amazon Affiliate, so they are in a direct business relationship with Amazon.
Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker
#5I can't quite understand this article and its conclusion.
The article says: "[The extension] will collect information about the products you look at and the ones you search for".
Yet, two sentences later it says "The company behind the extension fails to comply with its legal obligations. The privacy policy is misleading in claiming that no personal data is being collected."
So which personal information is exactly included in the data submitted to their servers about the products? Because in that json example I don't see anything that would be even close to personal information.
The remote scraping/execution abilities are not great, I'll give it that. But the rest of it seems like overblown conclusion and interpretation of how it works.
Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker
#6I use Keepa basic and it has saved me a ton of money. I always just assumed it was scraping the prices from pages I visit, but I didn't know it would automatically fetch Amazon pages in the background. Might just sign out of Amazon, and use a separate browser to purchase from it.
Either way, I have some thinking to do on if I should "keepa" it or not (sorry really bad joke). Maybe I should purposely turn a blind eye and just trust they aren't going to do anything evil nor have some privacy risk due to how useful it is.
Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker
#7I can't quite understand this article and its conclusion. The article says: "[The extension] will collect information about the products you look at and the ones you search for". Yet, two sentences later it says "The company behind the extension fails to comply with its legal obligations. The privacy policy is misleading in claiming that no personal data is being collected." So which personal information is exactly i…
I’d assume that "products you searched for", even if only implicitly thanks to the results, is personal information. It also is not mentioned in their privacy policy, which only mentions sending on product pages.
Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker
#8I can't quite understand this article and its conclusion. The article says: "[The extension] will collect information about the products you look at and the ones you search for". Yet, two sentences later it says "The company behind the extension fails to comply with its legal obligations. The privacy policy is misleading in claiming that no personal data is being collected." So which personal information is exactly i…
Note: I am the author of the article above.
The history of all Amazon products you looked at or searched for is personal data, and it can tell a lot about you. Whether it is also personal data in the legal sense is not something I can say for sure. But it definitely has to be properly covered in the privacy policy, for GDPR compliance at the very least.
Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker
#9From the Keepa addon settings:
> Allow the add-on to gather Amazon prices to improve our price data
I thought it was common knowledge that Keepa uses the addon to gather prices. Though with GDPR it probably needs to be more explicitly said.
Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker
#10I can't quite understand this article and its conclusion. The article says: "[The extension] will collect information about the products you look at and the ones you search for". Yet, two sentences later it says "The company behind the extension fails to comply with its legal obligations. The privacy policy is misleading in claiming that no personal data is being collected." So which personal information is exactly i…
I’d assume that "products you searched for", even if only implicitly thanks to the results, is personal information. It also is not mentioned in their privacy policy, which only mentions sending on product pages.
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